This is somewhat corollary to DEAN's latest Booze Review, as I was forced to visit the local Kroger here in Athens, GA tonight to pick up a book of stamps and some other assorted sundry items for the morrow. I ended up strolling through the beer, just out of curiosity, to check the price on the Hoffbauer (5.49 a 12 down here, tucked away by the Pabst and Mil's Best), but right next to all the Cold Frothy Liver Death is a sizable organic/whole foods section. Coming from 14 years of South Carolina grocery chains, anything of this sort is a bit of a shock; ask the clerks at a Piggly Wiggly if they have whole foods, and they'll go hunt down a frozen Butterball turkey for you. However, I don't think SC has a party school anywhere that's on par with UGA, so the abundance of health foods makes sense: you spend Friday through Sunday treating your liver like your co-dependent ex-girlfriend - abusing it at every turn because its job is to sit there and take it, every drink the toxicological equivalent of telling it, "Your hair looks like shit; don't you know what the fuck a comb is?" - and then you have to pay the rest of the week for your transgressions by trying to find some soybean-derived, gluten-free, home-grown, pesticide-absent miracle cure to stave off the onset of cirrhosis at 20. But I digress.

There were plenty of things I wanted to pick up, but it was late, and I settled upon some quick treats. It was hard to put down the whole-wheat pasta, but A) it was 2 bucks for half a pound, B) I still have 4 pounds of normal pasta (that I paid about 85 cents for) sitting in my diminutive cupboard, and C) I wanted to sleep tonight, rather than spend the next four and a half weeks on the john. Anyway. First thing I got was the Big Soup Noodle Bowl brand of Miso & Tofu. I've had to swear off the college staple of ramen noodles lately due to the trans fat content (more on that later), so I went after this to see if it compared. I even did as the Japanese might and ate it with chopsticks; however, that didn't last too long, as the fingers in my right hand began cramping after 5 minutes or so. I guess my hand just isn't accustomed to handling something so THIN. Anyway...anyway. The soup itself had a nice aroma to it when I first dove in, but it ended up far too salty and a little bit bitter for my liking. The tofu just isn't any replacement for the little packets of chicken or beef buillion you get with the ramen; they even tried to kickstart this with little bits of green onion, but they were too few and far between to swing this away from flavorless.

So yeah, about the trans fats. Eat enough of these things, and they kill you. You don't get a heart attack, they don't harden your arteries - you can just sit there, eating your trans-fatty meal, and drop fucking dead from this shit. And it's in everything - read your labels for "partially hydrogenated soybean oil" (sometimes it's cottonseed), and you'll see it in cereal and candy bars and snack cakes and cornbread mix and cake mix and the FUCKING WHEAT BREAD THEY SELL AT THE STORE. The shit you halfway trust to be reasonably good for you will kill you. Like carb-laden Raid for people. Five fucking slices of fucking whole wheat bread and you die. I mean, what the fuck. Some of you fat tubs of shit probably have pounds of this stuff floating around in you: how you've lived this long with all that, I don't know, but if you ever feel suicidal, just realize you hold a AAA-sized high school's lives in your spare tire and be EMPOWERED. If you don't keel over.

So yeah, I'm trying to stay away from trans fats, and I'm walking out of the section when I see some cereal bars made by Health Valley - I see blueberry, I see strawberry, I see apple. I choose the only one that can possibly be any good, that being the apple - as there is only one true strawberry flavor and I make some seriously fucking mean blueberry desserts that are so going to smoke the fuck out of these blueberry pretenders wrapped in cakey bars. And that's what I always forget about these things - the crust, if you can call it that, is always too moist. I buy them thinking it'll be kind of dry and you can bite it off, but it's like eating a Fig Newton, and I fucking hate Fig Newtons (and they have trans fats in them, too, the ratbastards). HOWEVER, what is not Fig Newton-like is the taste; I wallowed in self-pity over the Fig Newton-ness for the first bite, but further sampling revealed a pretty kick-ass filling. I couldn't really place my finger on it, but I'd wisely chosen to wash it down with some orange juice, and it was the co-mingling of the flavors that did it, as I realized Health Valley was unafraid to assault the shit out of you with cinnamon, leaving the whole bar tasting like a cinnamon sticky bun or, better yet, a cinnamon donut (which I also can't eat anymore because of...yeah, you get the picture). The drawbacks here being, of course, the cakeyness playing blanket to the sweet apple filling pig, and the predictably tiny size of each bar. I could probably cram a box of these (6) in my mouth at once. I'm sitting here, staring at the spent wrapper, tempted to test my own braggadocio, but I won't.

yummmmmmy!!! Miso & Tofu!!!! I haven't had that in a good year...time to see if mom's gonna invite me over any time soon for a nice warm bowl of homemade Miso & Tofu...

(edited by rikidozan on 27.8.02 0139)"You can't fire a gun in a confined space! What are you tring to do, make us deaf?!""Just get out of the chopper.""What?""Get out of the chopper!""The crops!?" - Jack Lemmon and James Garner, "My Fellow Americans", and the reason I say "The crops?" instead of "Huh?"